The present invention relates to apparatus, method and program for supporting review of materials (documents or the like) and more particularly to apparatus, method and program for efficiently performing a series of work operations such as review, minutes preparation, pending issue management, and correction of review documents.
JP-A-7-146860 discloses that pieces of information for review of a designated document by a plurality of reviewers are taken out in accordance with a display command so that, on the basis of position information in these pieces of review information, a corresponding display position in original document displayed on the screen may be determined to make a display area vacant and the review information may be displayed in the vacant display area, and that it is commanded whether the review information by the plural reviewers displayed on the original document in correspondence with the reviewers is adoptable or non-adoptable and the display form is changed in accordance with the adoption or non-adoption so that only review contents commanded as being adoptable may be extracted to correct the original document in accordance with the review information.
JP-A-6-274493 discloses a document management apparatus in which a plurality of document review processors used by a plurality of document review members to perform review work are mutually connected through a network, one of the plurality of document review processors is defined as a server having a common comment database prepared and used in review work, the server and the plural document review processors constituting the document management apparatus, wherein each of the plurality of document review processors includes review member managing means for managing access to the database of the server from review members cooperatively participating in work of reviewing individual review object documents, means for enabling an examinatorial reader to prepare comments necessary for review, answer preparing means for enabling an answerer to make a response to a comment, comment searching means for searching only a necessary comment from a large amount of comment data, comment display means for adjusting retrieved results and displaying them, comment managing means for managing comments prepared by a plurality of examinatorial readers and data of answers prepared by a plurality of answerers and for printing review results, and review notifying means for managing forwarding of various notice documents necessary for adjusting the work between the review members.
In review, obscurities in a review object document and a solution thereagainst must be clarified. In addition, a series of work operations of putting together the review results in a minutes and a pending issue list and eventually correcting the review object document must be fulfilled.
The aforementioned prior arts, however, fail to describe that a system (application) for editing an object document into which comments are to be inserted differs from a system (application) for displaying and editing the comments collectively. Further, none of the aforementioned prior arts disclose a plurality of object documents prepared by different systems (applications).
Further, in the JP-A-7-146860, review information can be post-scribed in a specified range in a review document but the review information is information for document substitution by which adoption or non-adoption of the review document is determined.
With the JP-A-6-274493, when such work as examinatorial read request, examinatorial read completion, answer request and answer completion is carried out through mail notification, interchange of mails is necessary for a participant to prosecute examinatorial read work. Accordingly, for performing examinatorial read, at least four mail interchange operations of examinatorial read request, examinatorial read completion, answer request and answer completion are necessary. In other words, a considerable amount of work operations are needed for examinatorial read. Further, much time is lost in interchange of mails. In addition, to respond to a comment, a review reader selects an answerer and forwards a mail to the answerer. In failure to obtain any answer, work for reselecting another answerer is needed and expectantly, re-work operations will be done many times.